The hurricane season arrives in Mexico as the country barely sticks its head out from under the coronavirus pandemic. While many are preparing for the worst dystopia in recent times, in the cities of the Gulf Coast, some people claim to feel protected from tropical storms like Cristina — a storm meteorologists announced will arrive in Tamaulipas in the form of showers. The reason?

An extraterrestrial base located, residents say, under Miramar Beach, in the town of Ciudad Madero and also in Tampico, whose intergalactic owners have been diverting cyclones for more than half a century. 

That is the opinion of a group of ufologists from the Association of Scientific Research on UFOs in Tamaulipas (Aicot), whose president, Juan Carlos Ramón López Díaz, said he visited the alien base, known as Amupac, during an astral trip. However, many in this region claim to have seen flying saucers and even to have been abducted by mysterious guardians of the climate. 

According to López and his collaborators, the Amupac base must have been established in the mid or late 1960s, shortly after Hurricane Inez caused countless damage in the Caribbean, Bahamas, Florida and also in Mexico, where 74 people died.

But what really protects this region are not the aliens themselves, but the faith of neighbors, who have turned the shops on the Miramar Beach boardwalk into a sanctuary where you can buy all kinds of glass figurines and Martian-shaped murals. They even have their big day, the Day of the Martian, which is celebrated on the last Tuesday in October, even though it does not exist and, like the green Martian that presided over the beach in 2013, was the idea of a local television station. 

"The collective mind is charged with this concept, so it generates a large force field of repulsion," López told The Guardian. 

There are also those who talk about magnetic fields and a structure with bars of different material buried at the bottom of the sea, near the beach, which deflects storms on the advice of "the visitors." Or those that accept the inexplicable and blessed phenomenon without giving it too much thought, as Tampico historian Marco Flores does,

"If science doesn't give us any explanation, we'll get it by magic," he told The Guardian. "Fantasy is always more attractive than reality."

For researcher Rosario Romero, who works on climate at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), there is nothing mysterious about Ciudad Madero being a hurricane-free enclave or one with less intense tropical storms. The most likely, she said, is that broader atmospheric conditions, such as prevailing westerly winds or high pressure subtropical systems, are driving the hurricanes towards the southern coast of the United States.

Romero also warned that despite not being directly hit by any hurricane since 1966, Ciudad Madero did suffer significant flooding in 2013, caused by Hurricane Ingrid, and that it is important for neighbors to always be prepared for the unexpected turns storms can take. 

"We now have advanced monitoring systems and numerical models that allow us to predict the intensity and trajectory of a storm — but trajectories still vary widely depending on those wider weather conditions," she concluded.

"If science doesn't give us any explanation, we'll get it by magic", the historian said. 

Meanwhile, the director of Civil Protection of Ciudad Madero, Romel Martínez, who was recently interviewed by Gabriela Castillo, explained that this phenomenon in which hurricanes deviate at the last moment is known as "tampicazo."

"They tell us sometimes that (the hurricanes) come directly to what is Tampico, Altamira and Madero," said Martínez. "We take all the precautions, we do our job: newsletters and tours. We even have our temporary shelters ready. This is not the first time this has happened to us, it has happened many times before."

Despite the fact that science is trying to impose its forecasts and warnings, so stargazers and swimmers at Miramar Beach, who can no longer enjoy the waves because of the COVID-19 alert, are still looking out over the ocean and are filled with a kind of gratitude for the intergalactic watchers.